Indie Authors Are Responsible for the US eBook Decline

Over the course of the last two years the modern bookstore has been undergoing a resurgence in sales. The publishing industry have all reported that e-book revenue is down between 2-6% year on year and 12% across the board. The funny thing is, publishers for the most part are making more money, primarily due to higher e-book prices, but most are seeing a modest increase in print sales.

Why are bookstore chains like Barnes and Noble enjoying a robust increase in book sales? I think the main reason is because they only stock physical books by new authors that the publisher is really hyping and perennial bestsellers by recognizable authors. Simply put, it is far easier to discover a great book in a bookstore, than try and find one online. So why are digital sales truly down? The answer is too many e-books being self-published by indie authors.

Independent and self-published authors release more books on a monthly basis than the trade houses do. This creates an influx of new titles that fall by the wayside and pollute the search engine results, so it is almost impossible to casually browse and find something good. E-Books are immortal, so they never go out of print. Like cobwebs constructed of stainless steel, they will forever occupy the virtual shelves of e-book retailers. Every month there are more and more books for readers to choose from and there are now fewer eyeballs split across more books, this is the real reason why e-book sales are down across the board.

Not only do self-published authors write legitimate books that nobody reads, but some are doing some very shady things. One enterprising software engineer posted 800,000 Kindle titles that were written by an algorithm and there is a growing trend of authors taking advantage of Kindle Unlimited to redirect people from the first page of the e-book to the end, so they instantly make the full amount of the monthly pool of funds.

Self-published e-book have also generated a ton of negative publicity. In 2013 a global firestorm erupted due to hundreds of adult eBooks with topics ranging from threesomes to incest were listed in the same category as kids books. This has resulted in UK bookstore WH Smith shuttering their entire online bookstore. Kobo deleted close to a thousand titles on their platform and giving a scolding to the vanity presses and indie authors who were responsible. The metadata problem continues to run rampant even today.

Spamming out e-books is obviously working for indie authors right now. In two short years, the market share of paid unit sales between indie and Big 5 e-books has more than inverted. The Big 5 now account for less than a quarter of e-book purchases on Amazon, while indies are closing in on 45%.

The big reason why indies are enjoying more success right now is because their titles are priced anywhere between .99 and $5.99, while major publishers tend to charge between $9.99 and $18.99. In January 2016 the Authors Earnings website reported the following;

4 of Amazon’s overall Top 10 Best Selling e-books were self-published indie titles

10 of Amazon’s overall Top 20 Best Selling e-books were self-published indie titles

56 of Amazon’s overall Top 100 Best Selling e-books — more than half — were self-published indie titles

20 of Amazon’s overall Top 100 Best Selling e-books were indie titles priced between $2.99 and $5.99

Indie authors might be doing well right now selling their under priced e-books, but the Amazon is making more money right now selling physical books. This is driven by steeply discounted hardcovers and paperbacks, which in many cases were priced even lower than the e-book editions. Things are going so great for print right now that in 2015 Amazon generated more revenue selling physical books than e-books.

I think indie authors days are numbered selling digital content online because of big new trends in the publishing industry that they are unable to capitalize on. One example are adult coloring books, which many credit them with saving the traditional publishing industry’s overall 2015 sales figures… a claim borne out by Nielsen Bookscan’s print-sales numbers. In the first three months of 2016 11 out of Amazon’s Top 35 Best Selling print books were adult coloring books.

The CEO of Smashwords, Mark Coker had some interesting thoughts on what customers are starting to notice about indie e-books.

Many indies release their books without professional editing and proofreading.

A surprising number of authors end their book with a period and that’s it, and not with enhanced back matter and navigation that drives readers to your other books and drives the growth of your social media platforms.

Although indie authors are releasing books with better quality covers than ever before, a surprising number of authors still release books with low-quality homemade covers.

A lot of series writers haven’t yet experimented with free series starters, even though I have found that free series starters are proven to drive more readers into series and yield higher overall series earnings.

Even though there’s strong evidence that longer e-books sell better than shorter e-books, some authors still divide full length books into shorter books that can disappoint readers.

Sloppy descriptions. You’d be surprised at the number of self-published book descriptions that have typographic errors, or improper casing or punctuation. Readers pick up on this stuff. Mistakes like this are like a slap in the face of your prospective reader.

Some of the brightest minds in the publishing industry also agree that there are too many indie e-books being published right now and this is leading to a decrease in overall digital sales in the United States.

Chuck Wedig mentioned in a recent blog post “The sheer number of releases is an issue all its own. It becomes increasingly hard to stand out merely by publishing a book in either form. It’s like trying to get a droplet of water to stand out in an entire goddamn ocean.”

He went on to say “The issue becomes more complicated when you add in the fact that, in my opinion, a whole lotta these author-published releases are going to be the equivalent of smearing poopy handprints on the windows of your Plexiglas enclosure. This is par for the course, maybe, because one of the features of self-publishing is that the door is open to anyone. Everyone. Always. No bouncers at this nightclub door, which is fine, but that also means you get folks with no shirt and no shoes. You’ll get folks dressed to the nines in sharkskin suits and you’ll also get wild-eyed dudes who are eating goulash out of rubber boots and who are quietly masturbating in the corner. You let anybody swim in the pool and, well, anybody can swim in the pool. With so many people trying to find something good to read, the indie books become more noise than signal.”

Some people just don’t see why people should self-publish at all. Andrew Franklin, founder and managing director of Profile Books, blasted authors who self-publish. “The overwhelming majority of self-published books are terrible—unutterable rubbish, they don’t enhance anything in the world.” He ranted on by saying, “These books come out and are met with a deathly silence, so the principle experience of self-publishing is one of disappointment. I was very shocked to learn you can buy Facebook friends and likes on social media. That is what passes for affirmation in what I think is the deeply corrupt world of self-publishing.”

The Solution

My suggestion is for all major online bookstores that take submitted indie content to create their own sections for self-published writers. These titles should not be listed side by side with the traditional press as they are now.

Indie e-books should have their own dedicated sections until such time as they reach a certain threshold in sales. Once they can attain an arbitrary sales milestone, they are drafted to the big leagues and listed in the main bookstore. This idea has merit as every single sports organization in the world as the minor leagues and the big leagues. The minor leagues purpose is to hone talent and develop them into good athletes, who eventually get the call up.

I think segregation is the only answer for the publishing industry. Amazon will sell more titles from major publishers and major publishers will generate more money. It will be a boon for the average reader because they will find quality books and get them continuing to support the digital format, instead of flipping back to print.

People love their bookstores, it is easier to find something you would want to read. Things are organized in neat little shelves with new titles near the entrance and new and notable titles being promoted. In an online world, there are so much indie trash everywhere that it is next to impossible to have a great shopping experience. This is why indies have ruined e-book sales in the last year and more people are shopping in the real world.

Amazon and the major publishers must adopt segregation for the survival of the e-book format.

Michael Kozlowski is the Editor in Chief of Good e-Reader. He has been writing about audiobooks and e-readers for the past ten years. His articles have been picked up by major and local news sources and websites such as the CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and Verge.

I think indie authors will realize that my argument is sound and they will basically just all silently agree.

KenPrescott

E-book sales are NOT down; Traditional publishers’ e-book sales, however, are down. Why? Because they are charging inordinately high prices for their e-books, and doing so solely to drive consumers to traditional books because they control those distribution channels. (It is entirely possible to get a newly-published hardcover at a lower price than the e-book edition.)

That is a deliberate strategy. It is also extremely stupid. It’s an analog-age business model in a digital world. It isn’t sustainable. Most publishers (if not all), by any reasonable economic analysis, are losing money. (They’d make significantly more money if they reverted their publishing rights back to the authors, terminated publishing operations, fired their staffs, and simply sublet their office space.) The mindset inherent in this strategy is to ignore the real problems of the business–inadequate fiscal controls, antiquated business processes, and a painfully slow business cycle that means slow revenue realization for the publisher (and even slower for the talent that actually manufactures the product, which is another factor that encourages authors to forgo going to the Big 5).

What can’t go on forever, won’t. At some point, the Big 5 are either going to exhaust the patience of the conglomerates that own them and get “rightsized” right out of existence, or they will simply slide into bankruptcy. (The latter might be a blessing; it would give an entrepreneurial biblioholic a shot at reinventing big publishing for a 21st century business environment.)

As for the quality argument: the trendline in the Big 5 is downward. Today’s Big 5 book is significantly more likely to have embarrassing typos, duplicated and/or missing signatures, and botched editing than one published in 2006.

Hey Michael, great idea about book sales being the qualifier of minor leagues to big leagues as it would be great to compare some traditionally published writers with indie writers. As you are well aware there are many traditionally published authors who don’t earn out their pitiful advances so they would be relegated to the minor leagues using your approach, leaving the way clear for some indie writers who sell well – sounds OK to me.
As far as indie writers ruining the market – I wonder how happy the printed trade publications are that people like you can set up online and receive so much attention by simply being opinionated.
I have no problem with a free market and new technology at all, but if you’re going to moan about it on one front, then at least have the good grace to apply it to your own work and provide some balanced journalism!

Heywood Jablowme

Kozlowski, you click baiting moron. If you ever paid attention to what Data Guy puts out, you’d know that Indy books without an ISBN aren’t counted in the sales figures tabulated for the Big 5 and small presses.

There’s a mountain of sales going to Indy authors who don’t bother with an ISBN because they’re a hassle, cost money and are largely useless.

The real story you should see from that data is that Indy’s are taking a bigger bite out of the ebook marketplace. Trad pubs earn a larger portion of their revenue off paperbacks because they’ve got the book stores locked down and are losing marketshare to indy ebooks.

Seriously. Learn2journalism or take up crochet. I don’t think critical thinking is your thing.

Dionne Lister

Wow, if that isn’t a biased and misinformed post, I don’t know what is. Of course there are crappy self-published books; there are also crappy traditionally published books. If readers want to find quality books, they can sign up to Bookbub or Booktastik, where discounted books are offered that have been vetted for editing, so it’s a kind of gatekeeper service. You just have to know where to look to find good books. As an editor, all my clients were/are self-published authors, and as a self-published author, I go through 3 edits and I pay up to $1000 to get incredible cover art. Not everyone does this, but enough authors do, so the big 5 are threatened because many self-published authors know how to put out a quality book, and they are not constrained by the marketing or accounting departments of a big publisher. Readers are entitled to varied content, and that’s what they get in today’s market. And let’s not start with the publishers trying to protect the print market.

Christine Frost

Congratulations–you got a bunch people to share this tiresome argument and now your Analytics numbers will go up for a few days–good job. Segregation is the only answer for the publishing industry? It should also be for clickbait posing as reporting, too. #zzzz

The reason why the publishing industry is seeing less revenue generated from e-books is because of the spam indie authors are producing. This is why print books for the last year have been growing like crazy and more people are visiting bookstores.

There is no need to publicly attack me for having a point of view. The amount of indie e-books being self-published on a monthly basis is simply staggering. They are ruining the e-book discovery process, which is why the average reader has fled back to print.

Segregation is the only answer. If indies have their own little corner in major stores it will be easier for the best ones to be discovered, and for casual readers who just want to read prospective best sellers they can do that too.

When you can’t argue a point you just bow out, this proves that my premise is valid and you simply can’t dispute it.

Manny Tompkins

I’m great! I’m over here counting my bucks made from indie-published books while you’re defending your pile of nonsense in this post. Do you even read what you write? Dude, I think you need to have your brain checked. What trad pub paid you to write their propaganda?

But yeah. Thanks for the great laugh! Keep ’em comin’. Most of your posts are click-bait nonsense that is only there for entertainment more than mindful commentary about the publishing industry. Nobody comes to this site for news. You don’t offer any. You only offer your delusions.

Anybody remember this dude’s comments about how women depend on their husbands to write romance? That’s the kind of person who wrote this article. Poor women folk tryin’ to break out of the kitchen to write dirty books. And now they’re ruining publishing too!

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! People will always be laughing at you, Michael Kozlowski. Always. You’re a running joke in this industry.

Scath2012

Wait… the publishing industry is seeing less revenue from ebooks because of “the spam indie authors” produce?

I see a logic fail there.

If it’s spam being produced, it won’t sell (BTW, Amazon has been cracking down on actual spammy scam ebooks).

If the publishing industry is seeing less ebook revenue, that has nothing to do with spammy ebooks that aren’t selling.

It’s because readers are CHOOSING TO BUY INDIE BOOKS (you know, all the thousands and thousands of non-spammy ones).

Actually, the publishing industry isn’t seeing less revenue from ebooks. Only the TRADITIONAL publishers are. The rest of us (like it or not, we ARE part of the publishing industry!) are seeing plenty, thankyouverymuch. 🙂

Rick Murcer

I couldn’t disagree more. Are you telling me it’s easier to go through a book store, who, by the way, carry only a small percentage of print books in print, for obvious reasons, than do a search on Amazon? Really? If you think the Big 5, which used to be like the big 9, carries only great books, than you really are in the dark. People should be the gatekeepers, not some moronic attempt at segregating authors. Let the people decide, not your convoluted attempt at perverting the truth. And, for the record, you started this attack by stating what you stated. Live with it.

Rick Murcer

What? Oh my, do you have that wrong!

Author Melody Anne

I would really like to see this graph all the way back to 2010. Just as in any business there are ups and downs, and there is good and bad. The biggest negative I see to this article is lumping all indie authors into one category. Yes, there are those who don’t put maximum dollars and maximum effort into their titles, but there are those that do. There are also hybrid authors such as myself that publish for the big 5 and also publish on my own. It’s different markets that cross over to a certain extent. But saying ALL when speaking of any subject isn’t the wisest way to gain a good response. When you lump everyone into one category you will upset the masses. We’re individuals. Yes, anyone can publish, but that doesn’t mean that BobbyJoe down the street can publish a book about sitting on his tractor all day doing nothing and have an instant hit. Now, if he writes that story and there is something exciting happening like a Tornado coming and picking him up and taking him on an adventure and the story is written well, made into a children’s story maybe he will appeal to a crowd, and he might sell a lot of copies. I didn’t even call myself an author for 2 years because I had a certain measure of success I wanted to achieve before I applied that title to my job description. However, we each have different goals for ourselves. When I began, a bestseller was considered to be a book that sold 25 thousand copies. I don’t know if today that would still be a bestseller with books selling millions of copies.

Segregation is never the answer to anything. I just listened to the audible book North and South again recently and look where segregation leads. It’s not ever to good things. I absolutely never have problems finding good books because I go to the categories I love and do a search of the top 100 and then when I see something that interests me, I also look at the books purchased under that book as they generally will be the same theme. A bad book won’t stay high enough in the rankings to garner attention. Beyond that though, I have found some titles that interested me that weren’t necessarily at the top of the charts. Remember that Harry Potter was rejected 12 times before an editor’s child demanded to read the book. They agreed to publish it but told J.K. Rowling that it wouldn’t ever make enough money to give her a living. So there isn’t one person or even a hundred or a thousand that can judge whether the book is up to the standards of the masses. It simply needs to be available for those who might find a treasure.

I do agree that all authors should take pride in their work, no matter what it is. If you want to publish today, there is too much information out there to not do it right. That means, proper editing (yes, mistakes can get through, and do even in the Top 5, but they can now be fixed quickly and should be) professional covers, and properly formatted manuscripts. I don’t know if a book I buy is indie or not unless it’s by someone I’ve been a fan of my entire life such as Stephen King or Nora Roberts. I don’t look at the publisher because I don’t want to be biased.

Everyone has an opinion on this world of writing, publishing, and reading, but it’s important to realize they are opinions and not facts.

It is a very paltry % of indie authors that write good books, get ISBN numbers, hire an editor and have great cover art.

THE VAST MAJORITY just click submit on their word document and its on sale in the Kindle store within a few hours.

Indie authors for the most part are delusional. They think major literary awards don’t affect sales, think being on the New York Times Bestseller list is a fools errand and but champion their right to self-publish.

Just look at Thalia, Waterstones and Barnes and Noble. Book sales are up in proportion to e-book sales falling. The average customer is going BACK to the bookstore to buy print, because there are too many e-books to make sense of it, and this is due to indie authors spamming out hundreds of thousands of books every six months.

Misfit

You are out of touch with this industry. Please stop.

Misfit

“Honestly, segregation is a good thing.”

Wasn’t this exactly the same thing said by white people who wanted to keep black people away from their water fountains?

segregation might have a bad rap due to the negative condonation with affirmative action, but it does have its merits in regards to self-publishing and e-books.

Thomas Rowe

Over the weekend I visited my local Barnes and Noble. The place is packed with coloring books. Do those even count as books? Are these non books being figured into sales by publishers? I have also noticed that certain “pet” authors get most of the shelf space too.

As for editing quality I own several commercial books that have glaring typos in them. I suspect that the publishers farm out the editing work to companies overseas because the editors seem to have a passing knowledge of American English. I have seen the word clue replaced with the word clew etc.. This may seem like nit picking, but sometimes the typos and layout issues are glaring. The indy author does not have millions in their back pocket. What is the publishers excuse?

I have also noticed that book prices are on the rise too. I visited a chain used book store and found that a book that sold in 1984 for for $2.50 is now being sold for $5.00. A tiny copy of “Of mice and men.” sells for $10 new. That book does not have enough pages to justify that price. Ebooks have jumped in price too. The industry is in a funk and something needs to change.

Misfit

Seriously. You need to stop. You are not making your case any better. You’re only showing your lack of education.

Please keep in mind, Good e-Reader is devoted to following the digital publishing industry since 2008. We know more about this subject then you will EVER know.

BTW: Thanks for stopping by and your intelligent comment.

Misfit

I’m only matching like for like. There is no intelligent commentary in the article you wrote above either.

Dionne Lister

No, the average customer who wants certain books is buying them from the bookstore because the publisher makes the print books cheaper than the ebooks (paperback market protection). Ebooks sales have fallen for high-priced trad published books, not reasonably priced indie books.

I’m not surprised that people are going back into bookstores to buy print books when the legacy publishers have increased the price of their ebooks (which cost far less to produce–I know because I produce them) so that they cost MORE THAN EBOOKS. This after the standoff between amazon and legacy publishing that was recently so much in the news.

This means that ISBN* recorded sales of ebooks would go down and costs of print books would go up.

If that was what legacy publishing wanted to accomplish–bravo! They’ve achieved their goals. But I remember the days when we were told that hardback cost more than paperbacks to produce and that when the cost of paper went up, so did the cost of books. Yet when digital books came to the forefront, those same equations no longer applied. Digital books cost almost nothing to produce. There should be a marginal discount to reflect that over the cost of the paperback–instead many legacy publishers are charging more.

The average reader is scratching their heads and saying, “I might as well go to Barnes and Noble and see if I can get a discount there.” Go figure. It’s common sense.

I’m not going to sit here and insult you. But there’s a lot more to indie publishing than you seem to realize. I’m a successful indie publisher. I sold over 80,000 copies of my first book (sold, not gave away). I’m one of those dirty indies who actually pays for professional cover art and editing. I still price my books fairly, though, and yeah–that’s part of why they sell.

For those that might think this author is an expert, just remember that this is an opinion piece. It’s pretty fluffy on the facts.

*(By the way–most indie publishers don’t use the dinosaur ISBN system because it’s unnecessary and meaningless and overpriced therefore their (quite copious) sales are not being recorded for the purposes of this article.)

There are tons of successful indie authors out there with loads of happy fans. Don’t get caught up in the vitriol. I think that those of us who are bright and educated know that even the word segregation is distasteful. Let’s not speak of this again.

Misfit

“Condentation” is the wrong word too, smart guy! Condentation is not even a word. Merriam-Webster suggests these words as an alternative. Do any of these fit what you’re looking for?

contentation

condensation

condemnation

condonation — We already ruled this one out, so you might want to steer clear.

continuation

contestation

contentional

condensational

contamination

contention

I’ll add another one in case you want to actually pick the right word this time: connotation. There. Does that word work?

And we’re supposed to take the posts you write seriously? You can’t even wordsmith properly. Try a dictionary. Maybe put your posts in MS Word before you write them so you can see the little blue squiggly line beneath the word when you write something stupid.

Unfortunately, MS Word won’t put the blue squiggly underneath your entire document for you. You’ll have to try to rub two brain cells together long enough to figure that one out on your own.

Charan

Than, not then.

I’d say more but I think anyone arrogant enough to condescend the intelligence of others without proofreading their own response is less than apt to provide an even-minded, fruitful perspective.

Good luck with the whole “professional” image there, pal.

Manny Tompkins

What you don’t understand is that this is fun. This is fun watching you eat your own tail and try to spew your own uneducated drivel. This site of yours is a joke. You’re a joke. You should get a real job and stop spreading lies and misinformation about a subject about which you know absolutely nothing.

Smart Debut Author

Actually, people aren’t going back into bookstores. That’s a pretty little fiction publishers would like readers to believe. Insider industry stats actually show the opposite happening — even die-hard print buyers are moving online now.

Say hello to Edsel, Oldsmobile, Studebaker, Stutz, and a whole bunch of others that can’t make selling cars viable. Cars are a dead form of transportation.

And you’re a genius.

Manny Tompkins

Yours died a long time ago, back in 2008 when you started this site, I’m guessing. I like watching you flop and flounder. Thank you for so much entertainment tonight. You’ll be laughed into obscurity. Me, I’ll be working on my next book. I’m only doing this because you’re making me laugh. This has been entertaining! You’re an easy one to prod! I’ve been checking in here from time to time while I browse new cars–that will be purchased with the money I’ve earned from my indie books.

Are you just mad? Did nobody like your indie book? Did you fail as an author? Is that why all the hate? You can’t cut it in the publishing world, so you turn to asnine commentary on some non-factor website. “But we’ve been around since 2008,” you’ll say. You’ve been around that long, and STILL nobody takes you seriously. I know you think you’re being smart and writing pithy commentary, but it’s only important in that small little brain of yours.

Get a job as a janitor at a high school or something. Maybe you’ll pick up some new educational material as you mop a floor in a classroom, something from the real world that is founded in reality. It will be like a real life Good Will Hunting! Maybe a Robin Williams type character will come along and you can spill all your vitriol nonsense to him while he nods like you’re making sense. Won’t that be cool?

Don’t you get it? People come here to respond to this trash you’re writing just to prod you a bit and see what the monkey does. Put a quarter in the machine and watch the monkey type at his keyboard to try to prove a point that makes sense to no one. You’re the monkey, the village idiot, the court jester. Nobody takes you seriously, Mike, so dance for us. Dance little monkey, and let the intelligent folks laugh at you some more.

DANCE!

Sadly, the fun is over. I probably won’t check back here, so you can post another little one-liner that will make you feel better. (But does it really?) I have writing to do tomorrow, and I’m expecting a new Mac too (bought with money earned from my indie-published books :P). I’m going to be a real writer while waiting for the UPS guy to show up. Gotta get my 8K words in before I get to play on the new comp! Do you know what it’s like to be a real writer, Mike? (Hint: Blog warrioring on a silly little website and writing click-bait posts filled with false claims does not make you a real writer.)

Rick Murcer

Prove that asinine statement. Oh, wait, you can’t. Don’t throw out paltry percentage, Vast Majority, thing without truth. I’ve looked up several award winners and guess what, that ALL are far below the 100,000 mark for ebook sales and print sales. By the way, I see that you’ve never published a book, that I can see. How would you possible understand what goes into that? Again, people like you and he Big 5 don’t get to say what a good book is, the readers do, period.

Rick Murcer

So, just because something is produced by the Big 5, it’s automatically good? Wow, you really don’t have a handle on this industry, do you? As a side note, you term, casual reader is as undefinable as the logic of this article. I will give you credit for the trolling effort, however.

Jen Foehner Wells

They can’t make ebook selling viable because they never really TRIED. The online Nook store was a nightmare. Even typing in a title or author’s name into the search bar was no guarantee you’d be able to find the book you were looking for. Don’t tell me it’s indie authors’ fault that those failed. That’s the retailer’s fault. They never put any effort into it. They didn’t innovate. They didn’t try to compete. They just put out minimal effort and expected to make money. That strategy didn’t work.

Funny…seems like there’s an analogy there somewhere…

tmechanic

I believe he was looking for “connotation”.

Tara Pennington

I can see why actual books sales would increase as their ebooks are priced to high. Why would someone pay as much if not more for an ebook that it has been made clear on more than on occasion that you don’t actually own than you would for an actual book. Also to say that they should separate indie from traditional authors is crazy. I mainly like the rest of my friends read indie authors now. They are just as good and in alot of cases better than traditional published authors. Why don’t publishers pull put of the ebook market if it is that bad. There is an idea.

I make more money than most traditionally published authors. I also sell a lot of books in a market that has been dying for years now. I will put the quality of my writing and my editing up against any big 5 published mid-Lister.
All of my books ‘earn out’ that is they make me way more money than the pitiful advance that the big 5 pay to their authors (with the exception of the few top A-listers and politicians).
And saying that the big 5 don’t publish crap is ludicrous. So much of what they put out these days is garbage. Yes, the bar to entry in Indy publishing is lower, but overall the quality of the stories is higher. And if I had access to the tens of thousands of dollars of promotion that they do (I spend maybe $100 dollars promoting each book) I’m sure my sales would be in the hundreds of thousands too. Instead of just ten or twenty thousand. Which I manage to sell because I’m a good writer. But I’m not politically correct, because I don’t treat the male heroes/leads in my stories like shit. So I’ll never get picked up by the big 5.

So really. You don’t know anything about which you speak.

Heywood Jablowme

Stupid ideas must be shat upon or they will fester in to things like Socialism and crocs. Do you have any proof readers are going back to print? Any kind of refute that ebooks without ISBNs aren’t a significant portion of the market and that’s why it looks like ebook sales are shrinking?

Again, Koz, you aren’t good at this journalism thing. Hang up the hat and take up golf or yelling at pigeons.

Henry Vogel

Quoting from your opinion piece above:

“One enterprising software engineer posted 800,000 Kindle titles that were written by an algorithm and there is a growing trend of authors taking advantage of Kindle Unlimited to redirect people from the first page of the e-book to the end, so they instantly make the full amount of the monthly pool of funds.”

You do realize this has no longer the way Kindle Unlimited pays out, don’t you? Surely, as a site dedicated to ebooks and ereaders, you noticed all of the discussion generated when Amazon changed to payment per Kindle Edition Normalized Pages read by subscribers? Perhaps you noticed when Amazon made the announcement? Or maybe, sometime in the last year, you might have stumbled across a discussion of the issue? Since it seems you missed it, here is Amazon’s description of the not-so-new process:

Presenting such seriously out-of-date information in your opinion piece calls into question just how much you know about the indie process. I don’t doubt you have connections within the Big 5. That said, if you’re so far out of touch on something as fundamental to indie publishing as the way Kindle Unlimited pays out, it’s hard to give much credence to anything else you say or think about indie publishing.

The guy who uploaded 800k e-books did not opt them into Kindle Unlimited, they are merely for sale all over the site. This is a fine example about how one stupid dude is ruining e-book discovery for everyone.

It is far too easy to claim to be selling X number of titles and making X number of dollars doing it. Unless you have an ISBN number everything you do is relegated to the shadowrealms of non-existence.

So what evidence do you have that the increase in print sales is because of a glut of indy books and not, say, the higher price of Big 5 ebooks over the same book in paperback or the explosoin of adult coloring books?

You don’t. You have a bias and an unsubstantiated correlation. Go back to yelling at pigeons.

Albert

I think that’s nonsense. Markets like this have a tendency to be self-adjusting. In other words, if I am not making any money at some point I start doing something else. It really is a singularly curious argument to state that the problem is the number of people writing books!

Tara Pennington

I review mainly indie author on my own blog. And have even read and reviewed several from Smashwords or Amazon that I found at random. I also think it is crazy to lump all indies into the same group. I have read alot of traditional authors who works suck and have so many typos should we lump all of those together?

Henry Vogel

Read the rest of the quote. “…and there is a growing trend of authors taking advantage of Kindle Unlimited to redirect people from the first page of the e-book to the end, so they instantly make the full amount of the monthly pool of funds.”

How can there be a “growing trend of authors taking advantage of Kindle Unlimited” if that approach nets a grand total of two pages read. Two. As in the number after 1. As in a vast royalty payment of almost an entire penny. Yes, less than one cent is earned by this trick. KU payments have been like that for a year now.

This is not complex. You read the whole quote–which I included so I wouldn’t have to cut out part of the sentence, not to argue anything about the guy who uploaded 800K books–and then you respond to what I actually wrote.

Note that I’m not going to discuss your thoughts on the guy who uploaded 800,000 ebooks because I never discussed that in my reply. You simply selected part of your own quote and ignored everything else I wrote about.

So, were you aware of the change in KU payments implemented over a year ago? If so, why did you claim a “growing trend” of something which doesn’t work now? If not, we’re back to my original point. If you are ignorant of such a fundamental part of how indie writers are paid, why should anyone assume any of your other opinions are based on the current market?

As David Gaughran explained, and as was laid out in detail over on KBoards, scammers were using tricks “such as adding unnecessary or confusing hyperlinks, misplacing the TOC, or adding distracting content” to artificially inflate the number of pages read by Kindle Unlimited subscribers.

This details matters because in July of last year Amazon started paying authors and publishers with ebooks in Kindle Unlimited by the number of pages read, rather than the number of times an ebook is borrowed. This was generally viewed as a response to authors who were cheating the system by uploading really short works and getting paid each time one was borrowed, and it was supposed to level the playing field by making sure that longer works are valued the same as a short story.

As the theory goes, scammers had figured out that Amazon wasn’t counting the pages a KU subscriber had read in an ebook; instead Amazon was only measuring how far into a book the reader gets. So if the scammer can trick a reader to jump to a point 90% of the way into a ebook, that scammer gets paid for that 90% of the ebook no matter whether it was actually read or not.

If you are not apart of a major publisher or an imprint of one, you are not an author, you are just a casual writer. Your works should be sequestrated on major e-book sites.

Tara Pennington

No I am saying doing so will be nothing new to me as I do that all the time but deal I will pick one and read it in the next few days should I send you the link or just write the review here. I have no issue doing this but I at least want my blog to get the credit.

Jen Foehner Wells

Do you work for the big 5, because your reaction seems like you’re a shill…

Jen Foehner Wells

I assure you my bank account is far from the shadowrealms of nonexistence. You can look up my books. They are highly ranked on Amazon, but whatever. You’ve decided you hate indies and that’s your right. I won’t convince you otherwise.

The ISBN system is broken. It never worked. If it did, why does the NY Times bestseller list and the USA Today list both use bookseller data each week instead of ISBN data? If the ISBN data is impeachable, why isn’t it used for these things?

I’ll tell you why! It’s bunk. Bowker is a scam in the pocket of traditional publishing. They decided early on to fleece indie authors by charging exorbitant prices–when we all know trad pub pays pennies for each ISBN they use–and indie authors decided that they weren’t going to play along with this little game. We didn’t HAVE TO because retailers don’t REQUIRE IT.

And what, you’re telling me you can look up ISBNs and tell me how many copies have been sold? PROVE IT TO ME:

Here is the ISBN-13 for my first ebook, FLUENCY, which sold far more than 80,000 copies since its release: 978-0-9904798-0-2

I was such a newb I didn’t know I didn’t need one.

So there you go. YOU TELL ME HOW MANY I’VE SOLD.

KenPrescott

Do you have any metrics to back these statements up? (“VAST MAJORITY,” etc.)

I’m not even looking for the level of analytical rigor found in Author Earning’s quarterly reports. (That said, if you’re arguing to the contrary of AE, then you’d better bring your Pickett N4 slide rule and your mathematics A-game, or you’re only going to beclown yourself even worse than you already have.)

You’ve thrown some pretty harsh rhetoric around, and backed it with fluffy words instead of actual metrics. Just sayin’.

CM V

You’re yet another self published author who is very defensive when anyone says anything critical about self publishing as a whole.

Amanda

You might want to do some research about how KU titles are paid. You’re a bit behind.